Posts Tagged ‘features’

AdRotate 2.5

Written by Arnan on January 24, 2010 – 8:42 pm

At long last… An update.

I’ve been working on this for some time, bit by bit.

And here is the gist:

  • [fix] RSS feed parser now has proper error reporting
  • [fix] Installer, table field order
  • [fix] Redirect issue when editing or creating a banner manually
  • [fix] WIdgets no longer are in a list tag
  • [new] Now optionally lists image and flashfiles from the /uploads/ folder for banner images
  • [new] Ad Code is now generated when editing a banner
  • [fix] Tabindex for adding/editing banners
  • [fix] Preview when creating a banner with the wizard
  • [new] When a banner expires or otherwise needs your attention, warnings will show throughout the dashboard
  • [change] Wizard is now even simpler, the threshold options have been removed
  • [new] Group deletion now allows to delete all banners in that group
  • [fix] All event notifications grammatically updated
  • [new] Bulk actions allow moving ads to other groups
  • [new] Shows warning when a banner is not in a group
  • [new] Renew multiple banners for 30 or 180 days

As you can see, many requested features and improvements. Enjoy!

More information:
http://meandmymac.net/plugins/adrotate/

Download:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/adrotate.2.5.zip

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Where is WordPress heading? Idiocy to the max!

Written by Arnan on September 24, 2008 – 11:01 pm

The devs have some weird ideas lately. And to be honest, while they do a great job, i like WordPress less and less ever since 2.5 was introduced. Too much automation going on in there. Bah

What the hell is up with autosaving and revisions of posts. Not a bad feature per se, but make it optional please! It clogs up the database making it expand exponentially if you leave the browser open for a while.

And which idiot thought up that plugins should be automatically updated. But didn’t think about the problems it would bring. Many plugins are poorly written. Even more plugins require database additions from time to time. And NO plugin i ever seen has had a proper upgrade script or routine. It has to be done by hand. So, a few months ago when i released Events nearly every week and it required a bunch of new fields for storing that stuff. An automatic update would have been disasterous. As some of my users found out. Obviously because the database didn’t get updated. It had to be done manually. And as many of us know. Adding fields to a database is harder than uploading a few damn files. So while we’re at it. Just upload them your self and use the upgrade instructions the plugin maker provides. It’s makes your life just less annoying.

Another thing. Why can’t WordPress show proper errors. Sometimes i encounter a plugin that won’t activate. Sometimes i screw up and break my own plugin. All fine. But with the error “A fatal error occured” i don’t know where to look. Give me the original PHP error dammit. And no WP_DEBUG does not work. I tried that and it made apache cry and me frustrated because it generated so much errors i couldn’t even find my own anymore. So no… Just provide proper errors.

Why is the Richtext editor still acting up. It has been around for years. It has been used by millions and still it’s stripped down, broken and useless for anything else than dumb typing of text. most plugins break because of it stripping out tags and stuff. We cannot add forms, we cannot add tables or anything else that requires more than bold or italic text formatting. It sucks!

Why the assumption that we need Windows Livewriter support. Make it optional! I don’t even use Windows. Why include a link to use Turbo on every dashboard page. What is Turbo anyway. Useless, no one uses Google Gears. I much rather have that option in Settings > Misc where i don’t see it.

Blah!

All in all WordPress isn’t that bad. Truth be told… I still enjoy using WordPress, most of the time. But some things just piss me off. Especially if they do not work right or make no sense. It’s becoming a fool proof system, which for me, a sort-off nerd, is crazy. I like some things to be done manually, i like to be in control of my own website. It’s getting less and less of that. Even at the point that i need to write plugins to disable the new automated stuff and hack things out to make it work as i like it. Yuk.

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Genius is not so Brilliant… Or so it seems.

Written by Arnan on September 10, 2008 – 7:59 pm

So today i was happy yo install iTunes 8. Try out the new stuff and found the new music browser a bit of a cheap knockoff from iPhoto. But otherwise a nice sight. I still prefer the list view though.

And another “huge” new thing is iTunes Genius.
Basically what it does it matching songs together based on various things and behaviours. Which all have to be uploaded to the iTunes store. Then when it is done stealing your private data and settings it compiles random lists of tunes which supposedly “sound great together”. Seemed like fun, so i went on to have my library indexed and sent that profile to the iTunes store. This took like 10 minutes.

Then i tried to make a few Genius playlists only to find out this feature seems only to work with iTunes bought tunes. Most of my music comes from imported CD’s and other sources. Thus Genius kinda didn’t work for me… Bummer!
Why can’t it index everything? THe logical explanation would be that iTunes store does assign meta data to each song and thus if it doesn’t come from the store it has no meta data to match songs to. But i think this is more of a dirty trick to lure people to buy more songs, obviously… If the system really would be as good as Steve so proudly told us it would be able to assign meta data on the fly and thus index every song submitted. But that’s just my logical thinking…

Now i’m gonna eat my pie!

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